HiPE compilation gives NINE times speed increase!

[Matthias Lang]

Kostis Sagonas writes:

 > The speedup you get in this program is indeed more than average but is
 > not so surprising. We've put quite some effort in efficiently compiling
 > binaries to native code, the compiler optimizations that HiPE performs
 > are quite effective in such code, and we've experienced similar speedups
 > in some programs manipulating binaries.  On the other hand try-catch has
 > nothing to do with the speedup; it is entirely due to HiPE's compilation
 > of binaries.

Replacing the (hideous, IMO) try/catch stuff with some normal code
nets me a 3.5x speedup for BEAM and a 2x speedup for HIPE. Peak memory
use is also much less, under 100MB.

Assuming I didn't make a mistake, that is.

Matthias